critical quotes Flashcards
Madness - Lant
The ending of A Streetcar Named Desire renders Blanche a ‘maddened hysteric with no place in a well-ordered society’.
Challenge with sympathetic portrayal of Blanche’s ‘madness’. She sees, and makes the audience see her deceitfulness or unreasonableness as making ‘magic’. She’s not ‘hysteric’ but merely an outsider marooned between two repressive worlds and with no power.
Madness - Anca Vlasopolos - 2 quotes
- A Streetcar Named Desire shows the audience that ‘we are not safe so long as the measure of insanity depends on the powerlessness of the individual’
Support with Stanley’s exploitation of her vulnerability as a woman (e.g. passive assertion that ‘Her future is mapped out for her’) but contest against with Blanche’s actual hysteria.
- ‘Blanche loses because she fails to conform’
Blanche’s inability to assimilate into a post-war contemporary New Orleans leaves her marooned in a state of growing delusion (‘I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that’s sinful then let me be damned for it - Don’t turn the lights on!’)
Madness - Elizabeth Oakes
‘The Duchess is the object, not the source, of sexual innuendo’
Supported by the fact that the proposal scene is framed in Christianity and wholesomeness. The framing of Duchess as a ‘strumpet’ or ‘whore’ is based on the cruelty and misogyny of the Aragon brothers, not on her actions themselves. (‘Bless, heaven, this sacred Gordian, which let violence never untwine’)
madness - Callaghan
The response of the audience to the Duchess’s madness is ‘charitable’ but to Ferdinand’s is ‘mocking’.
Ferdinand ironically becomes the maddened hysteric that he attempted to frame the Duchess as.
madness - Brett Hirsch
The Duchess of Malfi shows that ‘intemperate anger and Machiavellian ambition can push a man past the limits of civility, and perhaps even past the border of the human’
Anca Vlasopolos - gender and power (threat to marriage)
‘Blanche represents only an illusory threat to the Kowalski union’ – challenge with Blanche’s class snobbery very directly aimed to put down Stanley
Elizabeth Oakes on the Duchess’s attempt to resist idealisation
‘the Duchess becomes the woman carved in stone that Ferdinand wanted her to be’
(R and M) Elizabeth Oakes on responsibility for the Duchess’s downfall
‘He [Ferdinand] not [the Duchess’s] society, is condemning her to a life of solitude’
Adler on the end of Streetcar
Blanche leaves the stage a ‘violated Madonna’.
The final image on stage is of an ‘unholy family’.
Thomas P. Adler on Stanley’s behaviour:
‘Stanley hides insecurities beneath a surface of virility that can easily descend into brutish behaviour’
Philip D Collington:
Collington: The Duchess becomes ‘masculine, even muscular, in her ability to withstand pain and sorrow
Roberta Barker
praises a 1945 production of the play for ‘explaining Ferdinand’s sadism for a post-Freudian age as a by-product of his jealous and admissible desire’.
Leah Marcus
‘Ferdinand burns with an incestuous lust for his sister’
John Roderick
The play frames Stanley as a ‘hero, warding off a sexually promiscuous intruder who threatens his ‘normal’, healthy marriage’
‘healthy’ marriage between the Kowalski’s - contest for and against with the quote ‘they come together with low, animal moans’
